


Bad Medicine

by 17thousand



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Mission Fic, Pre-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Unresolved Sexual Tension, cabin fever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29791923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/17thousand/pseuds/17thousand
Summary: Leia has a very long day aboard the Millennium Falcon.Inspired by that behind-the-scenes clip of Han & Leia in the corridor on Hoth.
Relationships: Leia Organa/Han Solo
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	Bad Medicine

There was a saying all historians knew, about war being long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. The first time Leia heard it, in school, she had nodded assiduously, thinking she understood. When she examined military strategies from the wars of centuries and millennia past, eager to apply their lessons to the present, she could recognize patterns, trace the consequences of each decision, and picture herself weighing the stakes before the now-legendary battles. She was deeply empathetic, and easily imagined the all-consuming fear of making a mistake and paying with other people’s lives.

But once she finally found herself in the midst of her own war, she realized she hadn’t known terror at all back then. Maybe she hadn’t even truly known boredom, either. Until now.

In her twenty years as world princess, galactic senator, and itinerant insurrectionist, criss-crossing the galaxy on countless occasions and accustomed to travelling for days or weeks at a time on all types of vessels, Leia had never run out of ways to keep her mind occupied, or found herself losing her cool. Spending four days stuck inside a Corellian freighter while it was grounded on a planet with perfectly breathable air, however, proved to be an unprecedented test of her limits.

\--

It had begun as a standard supply mission. The Rebel Alliance urgently needed more medical materials, and Han knew a trading port with vendors who fenced equipment stolen from the Empire’s regional hospitals. Eyebrows were raised and throats were cleared uncomfortably, but the situation was dire. _Hard to stay pure when you’re in a bind, isn’t it?_ Han had clucked sympathetically, leaning back in his chair with a steely glint in his eye. None of the generals had answered him, preferring to swiftly approve the mission and move on to the next item on the agenda.  
  
When he’d heard where Han was headed, Luke had asked to tag along because the space port was only four hours from Atravis, and his late-night research indicated that a Jedi had once travelled to the planet’s capital to oversee a peace treaty. He was desperate for any shred of information about the ancient order into which he had been initiated, then abandoned. He’d asked Leia to accompany him because she had visited the dilapidated city a handful of times as part of diplomatic relief missions, and knew her way around. High Command begrudgingly granted both requests. The supply mission could be extended for five days, it was decided, to allow the group to travel to Atravis and sift through the planetary archives in the capital. Any longer and the Rebels would risk running out of humanoid skin cells and plasma transfusions by the time the next strike teams flew out.

Now here they were, marooned on a dusty space station. Upon landing, Han and Chewie had acquired everything on the Alliance’s list in short order, while Luke and Leia remained on board. But as soon as they took off again and pierced through the planet’s jaundiced atmosphere, the temperamental ship’s alarms began blaring, warning of depressurization and imminent death. Han had no choice but to drop the _Falcon_ right back down into the port, docking in the very same berth they’d just vacated.

That was four days ago. Even if they managed to fix the problem now, they would have to head straight home. No time for Atravis, no archives, no Jedi knowledge.

Han and Chewie had dismantled half the ship before figuring out what was wrong. Luke at least had some experience tinkering with wiring and mechanics and was occasionally asked to lend a hand, but Leia couldn’t do much to help other than sort cables and prepare a steady flow of caf. And Luke, unlike Leia, was also permitted leave the ship and explore.

“Relax,” Han told her. He was adamant that the space station was too dangerous for the princess to venture into, and refused to allow her outside. “This place is rough. I don’t need to worry about you wandering around and getting kidnapped, on top of everything else,” he said through a mouthful of screws. “You got _Lost Royalty_ stamped on your forehead.”

Leia didn’t much feel like royalty, slumped over a bowl of re-hydrated noodles at the holochess table. As she watched Han slurp from his bowl, she thought of her grandmother. The Queen Mother, who Leia had never met, had died years before the Clone Wars, but her luminous portrait had presided over the dinner table in the royal family’s private residence. Leia’s parents would often pretend to hold conversations with the painting, to their young daughter’s endless delight. Breha would playfully beseech her mother for advice on how to parent such a willful, spirited little girl, and Bail would turn to the portrait and formally apologize when his rants turned profane. The Queen Mother had been revered throughout Alderaan for her wisdom and intelligence. Now, it occurred to Leia that the monarch had never known war. Her seventy-two years in this universe had begun and ended during a long period of intergalactic peace and prosperity. So how much could she have known, really? 

\--

“No,” Han said later, when Leia informed him of her renewed intention to take a short walk. Luke had been gone for hours, and they were waiting for Chewie to lumber back from the other side of the station, bearing the obscure parts needed to finally make the ship spaceworthy again. The forced idleness was maddening. Fresh air would lift her spirits, and she was curious to know how the congregation of vagrants and traders outside talked about the Rebellion’s war against the Empire.

“They don’t. If they care, they keep it to themselves. And the air out there is all exhaust, that’s why I’m keeping the hatch shut and the recyclers on.” He turned back to the multicolored wires spilling out of an open panel.

“Why aren’t you worried about Luke wandering around? You know how much he loves talking to strangers,” Leia asked from the doorway to the crew quarters.

“I don’t like that either, but I can’t stop Luke. Those Jedi tricks he’s been studying are no joke. I can stop you, though.”

“No you can’t,” she declared, marching towards the exit.

“Wanna bet?” Han caught her under the arms as she passed him and lifted her up mid-stride, then walked her unceremoniously back across the cabin, her legs dangling as she tried to break free from his firm grasp. He deposited her by her bunk. “Now you’re getting on my nerves. Take a nap or something. Let me work.” He shut the door behind him, leaving Leia too flustered to do anything but stare at it in shock. She could still feel the heat from his hands lingering along her ribcage, where her own nerves were busily, belatedly, investigating the unexpected contact.

Momentarily at a loss, she did try to take a nap. She took off her boots and lay down on the bunk, staring at the durasteel panels overhead. She’d studied the panels in this cabin for hours last night, after another nightmare. Dreams of Alderaan had been plaguing her for weeks. Not Alderaan as it once was; instead, Leia dreamt of convoluted undercover missions in which she and her Intelligence team somehow found themselves on Alderaan, except nobody knew what Alderaan was, none of them had ever even heard the name Alderaan, and when she told them they were on her home planet she was accused of conspiring against the Alliance and thrown into a cell. A cell much like her cell on the Death Star, with the hum of the _Millennium Falcon’s_ air filtration system providing the requisite background noise. Leia had woken up in a cold sweat and lain awake until dawn, while Han and Luke slept peacefully in the neighboring bunks, and Chewie snored in the second hold.

The thought of a nap lost its appeal.

She picked up her datapad and put it down again; she had already exhausted any research she could do remotely, and staring futilely at her documents only made the feeling of uselessness worse. Her thoughts circled back to her swaggering jailor. Lately, it seemed like Leia and Han could only get along for a limited number of consecutive days before some unspoken tension between them surged and boiled over. In extended proximity, inevitably, one of them would get snippy and the other would snap back, escalating until tempers flared, flamed, then burned out. Then their timer would re-set. But today he’d crossed a line, she seethed. _How dare he manhandle me like that?_ He was such a bully sometimes, doing things just because he could.

Desperate for distraction and feeling decidedly mean-spirited, Leia got up and opened the surly captain’s locker. Rummaging through his things would annoy him, and finding something to hold over his head might help her knock him down a peg. She surveyed the contents of the battered shelves. His entire wardrobe fit in only half the space; the rest was taken up by spare tools , indecipherable mechanical manuals, and the bottle of whiskey he broke out on special occasions. She rifled through the stack of counterfeit ID’s hidden in his socks, but he’d shown them all to her before. Dozens of iterations of his face, the length of his hair and the prominence of his cheekbones varying from one picture to another, stared up at her impassively, impervious to her scrutiny. She put them back in their hiding place. There were no other personal effects.

He lived like a ghost, she thought.

In the cabin’s fresher, Leia discovered that the mirror over the sonic sink was a medicine cabinet. She opened it. Bacta gel, bacta patches, bacta strips. Behind them, a tube of lipstick on top of a circular packet of pills. _What?_ Leia reached into the tarnished metal cabinet and picked up the lipstick, popping off the cap and twisting the silver base to reveal a lurid shade of purple. The bullet was worn down into a slanted nub. _Who?_

\--

“What if I wear a disguise?” Han, Luke, and Chewie turned to look at her. They’d been arguing about the newly acquired parts when she walked in, seated in a semi-circle around the holochess table and consulting a pile of diagrams. “I see Luke and Chewie made it back alive. What if I wear a disguise so I blend in better?”

“A disguise made of what? This isn’t a costume shop, there’s nothing on here,” Han said.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’ll borrow your flight jacket and that lipstick in your fresher.”

All eyes swiveled towards the captain with interest.

“What lipstick? What are you talking about?” he snapped.

She led them to the medicine cabinet and opened it triumphantly. “ _This_ lipstick. Also, all this bacta is expired. You should replace it.”

Han snatched the tube from her. “I have no idea where this came from.” He tested the color on his hand and stared at it, looking genuinely perplexed. Chewie hooted and smacked him across the back of the head. “You can have it if you want,” Han told Leia, “but you can’t go outside.” “That’s a good color on you, Han.” Luke snickered. “Go on, tell us about her.”

“I really don’t know. A lot of people have been on this ship. I don’t remember all of them. I gave you and the old man a ride, didn’t I?”

“Whoever she was, she didn’t take her birth control very carefully,” Leia said. She handed Han the circular packet and pointed to the haphazard smattering of intact pills. “Isn’t that what these are? The pills for if you can’t take the shot?”

She’d never seen his expression change so quickly. His mouth snapped shut and his eyes flashed wide then went carefully blank as he turned the packet over in his hands, scrutinizing every side of the packaging for clues. Chewie smacked him again, harder. “What language is that?” Luke asked, trying to read the fine print over Han’s shoulder.

Silence fell over the cramped room as they watched Han squint at the text, and Leia suddenly felt queasy. She reached out to pry the packet from his hands. “Ventoonian!” he exclaimed at last, twisting out of her grasp; this seemed to mean something to him, because relief washed over his face like sunlight. “G-force pills. That thieving little space-hopper we picked up on Ventooine a few years ago – remember her, Chewie? We liked her.” Chewie growled. “Well, _I_ liked her. She had to pop one every time we went to lightspeed. Their bones can’t handle it.” His brow furrowed with concern. “She should have taken them with her. For the trip back.”

“Sounds like she left in a hurry,” Luke volunteered with a smirk.

“Nah, she left in a daze.” Han grinned proudly, straightening up. The memory seemed to cheer him immensely. “That’s how you know you’re doing it right. Know what I mean, Princess?” He waggled his eyebrows at her suggestively.

“What? No. Don’t talk to me like that.” The knot in Leia’s stomach tightened further. She didn’t know what she had expected, or what she’d wanted him to say, but she suddenly found that she didn’t want to tease him anymore.

“Guess you don’t,” Han said lightly, his eyes pausing on hers. “Let’s get back to work.” He clapped Luke on the shoulder and steered him through the door. Chewie followed, shaking his furry head to himself.

\--

Left alone in the fresher, Leia turned back to the sink and reached for the lipstick again. She twisted it up, contemplating it like a lost oracle. It really was a shocking color, almost sinister in its dark hue. She tried to imagine the woman who had owned it, or picture anybody she knew wearing such a thing. She couldn’t. _Why not_?

On impulse, she leaned into the mirror and dragged the slick substance over her lips, carefully filling in the corners like her youngest aunt had taught her. She straightened up to assess her work. The girl in the mirror stared back, her expression inscrutable. The rich purple pigment brought out the whiteness of her skin and made her large eyes seem impossibly dark. Her mouth looked cruel under its opaque veil. She smiled hesitantly, and was entranced by her newly predatory, gleaming teeth.

This was not the girl who had waltzed with the sons of noblemen in the palace ballroom, or the student who spent her nights immersing herself in ciphers. She wondered what those well-bred boys would have said, had she debuted her new look on one of those stuffy evenings. Not much, she guessed. They’d always remained on their best behavior around the world princess. Her first and only boyfriend had seemed to calculate every phrase he said to her, wary of pitfalls or improprieties. He had kissed her bare lips with ardor, but never abandon, and his hands never once strayed out of bounds even as their political conversations grew more and more risky. None of them would ever have dreamed of propositioning her as casually as Han had, within days of meeting her – although she supposed _Why don’t you come up to my ship for a drink_? was probably his idea of courtly subtlety, it still made her blush to recall how he’d leaned in close. What kind of lines did he use on Ventoonian space-hoppers? She stared at her reflection, imagining herself stealing things from the _Millennium Falcon_ and betraying its tall captain, leaving him stranded in her wake with that stupid, slap-happy grin on his face.

The girl in the mirror looked amused, and capable of doing just that.

She turned off the lights. In the main hold, she could hear Han, Luke, and Chewie gossip as they assembled the parts, but she didn’t want to join them now. She sat back down on her bunk, unsure of what to do next and suddenly feeling drained. Their voices were soothing.

\--

Leia had worn her new purple lipstick to the state dinner, with the dusky evening gown her youngest aunt had bought her, knowing her mother would immediately send her back to her rooms to change. She’d done it on purpose, because Han had promised to meet her up there, away from the insipid formal event downstairs, and they needed to talk. It was urgent, she’d told him so, but she hadn’t expected him to wait for her out in the palace corridor, hiding behind an ancient suit of armor – or for him to pick her up and carry her the rest of the way. Leia allowed herself to enjoy the feeling of weightlessness in his solid arms, but she knew this was a bad idea. She hadn’t meant to get under the covers. This was the problem with him: he was reckless. She should have known better than to give him the slightest opening. Now he was heavy on top of her, and it was hard to remember what her plan had been, or why she needed to let go of him. “They’ll come looking for me,” she finally hissed into his ear. Han ran his lips down her throat, mouthing something she couldn’t make out into her dress. She dug her nails into his back through his shirt to snap him out of it, but it only made him press her down harder. “We can’t do this. I need to get back. The Princess can’t disappear for this long.”

“Princess?” he asked, laying a large, warm hand on her shoulder. “Princess?” He shook her tenderly.

Leia opened her eyes.

“We fixed it,” Han said brightly. She squinted against the bright overhead lights silhouetting him above her. They weren’t in the palace. She was still in the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s cabin, lying sideways on her bunk, and Han had sat down by her knees to gently shake her awake. “We’re taking off,” he continued. “Might be bumpy though, come strap in with us.”

“Okay,” she said in a small voice, disoriented.

“Sorry to wake you.” He paused, considering her, then smiled broadly. “You look nice in that trashy lipstick. My kind of girl.”

With a groan, Leia scrambled around him and hurried into the fresher to scrub off the forgotten make-up.

Xx

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
